With all their colors and fragrances, roses are arguably the world’s most popular flower and emblematic of beauty and love. The botanical rose essence in Blossom Water Lemon Rose is distilled from Rosa × damascena, more commonly known as the Damask Rose. It epitomizes that symbolism with its hot pink, tightly packed petals and heady bouquet. Also called Turkish Rose, it is indigenous to the Middle East, where it has been harvested for centuries to produce rose oil and rose water, and might have been brought to Europe as early as the 13th century by Crusaders. But to many of us with philosophical or artistic leanings, the rose suggests even deeper meaning. It is a metaphorical representation of life itself, with its ineluctable combination of thorny difficulty and sweet reward, and even more poignantly, its proffering of wisdom through suffering. No one expressed it better in the eight hundred years since Sufi poet Rumi wrote: “Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process . . . to look at the thorn and see the rose. . . . The rose’s rarest essence lives in the thorns.”